SaaS Tattler Issue 28

Top SaaS Insights of the Week:

SaaS Growth

“Success doesn’t come instantly, and it sure as heck doesn’t come from big announcements. It comes from a long term dedication toward building something real.” What is and isn’t success for your startup? The illusion of instant startup success can tell you.

The answer (for startups) is often “Brute Force”! There is a plethora of advice for startups on this blog but perhaps it’s because we’re implementing a lot of these ideas, the Brute Force one resonated so strongly. “Put your shoulder into it, spend your sweat equity building value, and brute force your way from idea to revenues.”

Customer Experience/Relationships/Success

As a startup you have 3 types of customers – newbies, students and experts. “When you design the user experience for your products, it is important to remember that every product actually has three different user experiences. These three experiences exist because you have three types of customers and each of them will use your product in different ways.” Taking all of these into account will get you as close as possible to your ideal product – and we all strive to achieve this, don’t we?

Ryan Estis sits down to talk to Seth Mattison, the internationally renowned expert on workforce trends and generational dynamics, and captures his conversation about obsessing over customer outcomes and how to drive more sales through referrals in these two videos. “The best salespeople know that customer success is the ultimate catalyst for driving growth in the new economy.” So it only makes sense that to make more sales, start obsessing about customer outcomes.

Super SaaS Fundings:

Apparently it was a slow August according to CrunchBase (personally, we recall still seeing quite a few dollar figures) but the CrunchBase Monthly Investment Map is showing that September investments are making a strong rebound and has already surpassed August totals with a week left. Here are a few of them:

HoneyBook – Platform for event planners raised $10M in Series A funding

An Infographic of Interest:

Other Great Weekend Reads:

Tomasz Tunguz documents best practices for startups on his blog. Although 1 through 7 were as insightful as only Tomasz can be, #8 is really compelling because he identifies an important responsibility of the management team: managing energy. “Startups are intense experiences. Driven by a burning passion to change some aspect of the world, startup teams push, push, push to grow as fast as possible. Without the right balance, though, teams burn out – a terrible outcome.”

“Making something new takes patience. But it also takes faith. Faith that everything will work out in the end.” In this short impactful post, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, makes a compelling argument on having faith in eventually.

There can never be enough curated lists of tools. Thanks to the individuals who take the time to compile them, we all save a lot effort self-researching. “Aside from having a personal assistant (we should all be so lucky!), an entrepreneur can make life easier by having some tools that simply get the job done.” Thank you Mark Evans for compiling the list of 17 Terrific Tools for Entrepreneurs.

Have you discovered the “How I Do It” campaign on the LinkedIn Sales Solutions Blog? There is so much to learn from the experience of others – what an awesome resource!